Friday, March 13, 2015

Update: After a few more trials we've learned that this process is still far from perfect. The original steps below will work initially, however, there are two key caveats.

It appears to work best if a student only adds the assignment to Google Classroom as a last step with a finished product. Adding during the draft phase can cause issues and the "Turn-in" feature is not recommended.

The teacher cannot edit or comment directly on the shared slides. This will break the sharing. The edits and comments will not be visible to the student. Only comment using Google Classroom's comment tools if needed.

For whatever reason, the Google Drive iPad apps still do not allow you to add images into Slides or Docs. Fortunately, there is a workaround for adding images in Google Slides that I recently learned about here. This method works well but in testing with students we ran into some hurdles getting the template out of Safari and into the Google Slides app. It was even more difficult if the student had the Google Chrome app installed because the "open-in" feature isn't available.

This video tutorial demonstrates a method using Google Classroom that bypasses the Safari/Chrome method. To do this I recommend the following steps.Teacher

Create a blank presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint, name the template, and save it.

Open Google Drive and go to the Setting icon in the upper right of the screen, click on settings and uncheck the box for "Convert uploaded files to the Google Docs format". This step is important. The process will not work if the presentation is converted to Google Slides.

Upload the template file and then change the settings in step 3 back to "convert"

Open Google Classroom and create a new assignment

Add the Template by clicking the Google Drive icon

Be sure to leave the file access set to "Students can View File" - Do Not select "Make a Copy for Each Student"

Student

Open the Google Classroom app and click on the assignment

Open the template attachment - This will open the Google Slides app

DO NOT EDIT YET

Click on the 3 vertical dots (settings), select Share, and then Make a Copy

Click on the 3 vertical dots again and select details

Look for the light grey edit pencil icon next to the title. Click on this to delete the title and rename it. Don't forget your name

Go Back to Google Classroom, open the assignment and click on the Your Work tab.

Click on the Add Attachment option and select the Google Slides presentation

Return to the presentation to edit and add images. Click on the + icon to select images from your camera roll or to take a picture with your camera